Friday, January 31, 2014

Book #7: Rereadings, edited by Anne Fadiman

I read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman a few years ago, and I truly loved it. I'm really a fan of reading about reading (although, you know, you can only do so much of it at once), especially about how much people love reading and why. For that same reason, I enjoyed this Rereadings book. The book is a collection of essays written by different writers, about old books they'd read and loved when they were younger, and revisiting them many years or decades later to see how they held up and how they felt about them. It was fascinating to see what books the writers had loved and why, and to see their reactions later in life. It seemed like a pretty common theme to many of them that they had loved these books wholeheartedly when they first read them, but upon revisiting them they realized many of the flaws in the writing or assumptions made by the author, which made it hard for them to love the book as much as they had originally. That progression seems kind of inevitable; I liked what Fadiman herself had to say in the introduction--when you read the book at first you are focused on the plot and the story, but when you reread it you focus more on breaking it down and analyzing it. But it still seems sad to think about losing the unabashed love that you once had for a book (although I know that's happened to me too already).

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but not as much as Ex Libris. I might have liked it more if I had read more of the books that the authors were writing about, but I'd only read one or two, actually. I have a few more books about books that I've got checked out from the library, so I'll probably be on this reading-about-reading kick for the next few days.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Book #6: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Okay, I've been reading Anna Karenina for three months now? And I'm just now finishing it. That wouldn't speak very well for the book, but I took a month-long break in the middle while we were visiting our families, and I think just knowing what bad things were coming up for Anna made me not want to jump back in to it. I knew it was a depressing story, and about halfway through I didn't want Anna to come to her inevitable fate, so it took a lot of energy for me to start reading again. But this week I decided I had to knock it out and couldn't leave it halfway finished, so I did.

And yes, the story is depressing. You can't help but feel how totally hypocritical everything and everyone is in their society, and how all of their wrath just falls on Anna when she does something to step out of line. It's said all over that everyone has affairs, it's openly acknowledged and talked about, but Anna does the unthinkable of actually going to live with her lover and leaving her husband, and she is punished unfairly in comparison to Vronsky. He is allowed to mingle in society and express his "manly independence" (which seems like such an important thing to all of the men in the book; no women seem to think about that at all), while Anna isn't received anywhere and is universally looked down upon. She realizes more and more how trapped she is in this decision she's made, how she's dependent on Vronsky and if he loses interest in her she is absolutely lost. It was fascinating to read her thoughts and see how she degenerates into almost insanity because her jealousy over everything and anything that Vronsky did, even as she knew it was insanity and that she was overreacting. In the end, she decides to punish herself and Vronsky by throwing herself under a train. So I mean, I think that committing adultery is a terrible thing to do, but you can't help observing and being affected by how unfair Anna's treatment is and the incredible double standard that was in force in their society. Just because she was a woman, she was thrown to the curb and destroyed.

The parallel story in the book is about Konstantine Levin, a landowner and farmer who usually lives in the country. You're introduced to him in the beginning when he goes to propose marriage to Kitty, the girl he loves but who has recently fallen in love with Vronsky (before Anna). Levin seems like he lives in his mind a lot--he is introverted and very concerned with deep, philosophical questions about what the point is of everything and how he can be happy in his life. He eventually does marry Kitty and they seem to have the most functional and happy marriage of the entire book--everyone else seems to be straining or cheating on each other, while Levin and Kitty have the normal tiffs and disagreements of newlyweds but care deeply about each other and see the best in each other. The book ends with Levin, who's become suicidal over his inability to answer his questions about life, finds relief through a discussion with a peasant and realizes that he does have faith in the Christianity of his childhood and believes in the goodness and righteousness that he can accomplish. The last line of the book is Levin saying, "But from now on my life, my whole life, no matter what happens to me, every second of it, is not only not meaningless as it was before, but it has the incontestable meaning of the goodness I have the power to put into it!" (868). So through Levin, the book ends on a hopeful note. I was always happy to come back to the Levin story (although Levin's and Anna's narrative overlap sometimes) because it was generally not so depressing and hopeless as Anna's.

There are so many things I love about Tolstoy's style. I love how you have a good sense of all of the character's thoughts and their innermost emotions; he really works the omniscient narrator thing. I love how there are entire scenes and chapters that are only there for establishing the characters' state of mind instead of allowing something dramatic to happen that will change the course of the plot (although, that's why his books are so long). I love how he portrays the anguished, inner thoughts of the two main characters, Anna and Levin, so that you can trace their development and changes and kind of understand their actions (Anna, in particular, struck me as particularly poignant and realistic as she became more and more jealous and desperate). I liked this book more than War and Peace, I think, and I liked that book a lot--mostly because the stories were much more focused and there weren't so many characters and plots to keep track of. But the great things about Tolstoy remain in both books.

I am so happy I read this. I really and truly enjoyed it. I think I would even read it again, especially having read it once now, because it really was so good (even though I procrastinated a lot about finishing it once I'd started).

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Book #5: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

I'm trying to remember where I'd heard of Wallace Stegner before. Maybe I just vaguely remember his name from the list of Pulitzer Prize-winners (which he won for Angle of Repose, back when I was planning to read all of them [which I still might do, eventually]), but several of my aunts recommended Crossing to Safety when I asked for recommendations on Facebook and his name was recognizable enough that I wanted to check out this book as one of the first from that massive list. And I'm very happy I did--this book was a beautiful read and such a realistic look into friendships that I thoroughly enjoyed my time reading it. I didn't expect it to be one that I plowed through in a day or two, but I didn't really want to put it down after I got into the story. I was telling Tommy how I automatically sort the books I'm reading in my head into Good Literature and not good literature--just based on the quality of the writing style, basically, and how "serious" and worthy the book feels, and this definitely fell into the Good Literature category. (I love reading both types, obviously, but I love the feeling of reading high quality books that are beautifully written because it just feels enlightening and uplifting and educational even as I enjoy myself.)

The description on the back of the book is really true to what is in the book, but it totally falls flat in describing what the book is really about: "Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage." The couples are Larry and Sally Morgan (Larry is the narrator, and a writer himself), and Sid and Charity Lang, and the book tells the story of how they meet each other and become best friends, and the duration of their friendship over decades. So, yes, yes, it does have all that it says on the back of the book--but that doesn't encapsulate how true this book rings to real life. What I really loved was how the conversations between the characters felt so realistic, particularly those between the married couples, and how Stegner builds the relationships between the characters so gradually and so flawlessly, without telling you everything but showing you how things lay between them through their interactions. I also liked how the storyline was so un-flashy--there were no dramatic affairs or violence or any huge fireworks that are supposedly what you need to build your plot around as a writer; this was just everyday life, where friends are made so strongly and then slowly drift apart over time but still love each other fiercely. I associated so strongly with some parts of the story, like the dinner party where Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally really fall in "love" as friends, where they keep talking till the wee hours of the morning because they feel like they have found bosom friends in this other couple--whatever Stegner did to write that, I felt it and I recognized it because I have been at parties like that where you can talk about anything and you are all totally in your element and you know you are making great friends. And later, when you can just feel the strain between the parties because of who-knows-what has come between them--I can recognize that too (even without decades knowing friends!) and it all resonated strongly with me.

The narrator says, about his friends, "I didn't know myself well, and still don't. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive" (12). And that's basically what the story is about--being friends through thick and thin, through coming to know all of each other's faults, through lean times where you stay away.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Book #4: Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

So apparently "Dear Sugar" is an advice column that existed in an online literary journal (or website, of sorts? I never fully understood where the column was but it doesn't really matter), where people write in with their questions and problems and get a response from "Sugar." Sugar was always anonymous, but her identity was revealed for the publication of this collection of the best of her responses. I feel like Cheryl Strayed is vaguely familiar to me, but I've never read anything else she's written. But I really enjoyed powering through this book. I started it this afternoon and already finished it by this evening because I just didn't want to put it down. It seems odd to be that interested in an advice column (although I'd always loved Dear Abby and Ann Landers in the newspaper), but Strayed writes so beautifully and so empathetically and gives such clear-headed, reasonable but emotional advice that I couldn't help but going on to the next one to see what she would be asked and what she would respond next. I was almost moved to tears by some of the letters people wrote in, about the sad, hard lives that some people have and the things they are struggling with--children dying, drug addictions, heartbreak, chronic low self-esteem. And Sugar somehow is able to respond in a compassionate and supportive way to everyone, on every topic, revealing things about herself as she does so. She shares about her mother's death, her father leaving her family, her failed first marriage, becoming a mother herself, and all of these terrible and formative experiences that she'd had and somehow is able to give parts of herself to help other people heal themselves. I feel like the beauty of this Sugar persona is that she really had empathy--she really felt people's pain when she wrote back to them and really wanted them to be happy, and tried to help them heal themselves and therefore heal their situations.

The one thing I didn't like about this book was some of the advice that she gave on marriage and relationships, repeatedly throughout the book. Mostly, I felt like her thoughts were really emotionally healthy and would really lead people in the right direction they needed to go. But I felt like Sugar was too cavalier about the marriage commitment, in the face of infidelity or other desires and problems. It seemed like over the course of the entire book, marriage was painted too often as a thing you can and maybe should easily get out of when you might want to just go do other things or that infidelity was painted as not really that big of a deal--no, it IS a big deal, but it's so common that it happens to everyone so you just have to work your way around it. And I know that I'm very young and very naive but I do not agree with those sorts of portrayals and it makes me almost sick to hear that sort of advice being dispensed to people, especially since its source makes it seem so reasonable and commonplace. (There was also a bit of language, or maybe a lot, just as a warning.)

But overall, I think reading the messages from the majority of these columns made me think more about how to be a better person and how to love other people better and treat them right--all good things that really felt heartwarming and definitely made the book worth the read.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Book #3: Virtuosity by Jessica Martinez

This was a book that came highly recommended by several book bloggers I follow, so I was really interested in reading it. The book is about Carmen, a child prodigy violinist who is about to compete for the Guarneri Competition, a four-year-long fellowship which is the highest and most prestigious award in the world for young violinists. Everyone knows that she's the best--she's already won a Grammy for classical music and has a full ride to Juilliard--and her only real competition is a young British guy named Jeremy King. She meets him, and starts to like him and fall in love, and everything with her competition starts to unravel. Dun dun dunnn!

Okay, so, first off, I really enjoyed this book. It only took a few hours to read (major bonus!) and I loved the author's style. I really wish I could formulate a reason for why I like some styles and why I can't get past others, because it sounds like such a cop-out to just say "I like their writing style" and I feel like it's part of the job of a review to spell things out. But you know how with some books, you just get stuck on awkward phrases and you just know you're reading as you read? You can practically feel the author crafting every word, searching through their thesaurus for synonyms and rewording sentences? You can't ever forget the words that you're reading? But with other books you can, you skip the reading process and you get sunk into the story enough that you are IN it and you're practically one of the characters? THAT'S what I look for when I read these quick, easy novels, and that's what I get real enjoyment out of. And this book had that quality--I wasn't distracted by the writing to get to the story. So that was a real plus.

There were several elements that seemed a little odd in this book. First off, why does she call her mom by her first name? It's weird to always have the mom referred to as Diana in the book. Second, the whole boy-and-girl-get-into-fight scene that always has to happen in a romance (the girl finds out the boy started after her for a false reason at first) felt so false to me. Jeremy asks Carmen to throw the competition so he can win for his dying brother? And then Carmen still likes him enough to go away with him in the end? Now, come on. How could you trust him again? And also, can we remember that the whole course of this romance happens over less than two weeks of time and over two, MAYBE three dates? Why don't people follow NORMAL timelines when they're writing books? Or am I just crazy here? I also wasn't a huge fan of the ending. I think she went back to Juilliard, but I don't like how COMPLETELY ambiguous it was. I assumed it was because she was leaving the path open for a sequel but it doesn't look like it, after doing a few google searches.

I did like the twist at the end that changed the whole path of how the competition went, and I liked the addition of the whole issue with Carmen taking anxiety pills. I felt like that should have been a bigger deal than it was in the book though. It really could have been a much more interesting, bigger issue that complicated a lot more in the book.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Book #2: The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell

I started this book yesterday (or the day before?) and had high enough hopes for it. It seemed like a very interesting, Great Gatsby-ish story. Rose Baker is a 1920s typist at a police precinct in New York City, and she's nothing that interesting--she's plain and efficient and poor and pretty boring. However, her life quickly gets more interesting after a new typist gets hired at the station, named Odalie Lazare, and Rose becomes enthralled with her. And by enthralled, I mean obsessed--she starts taking notes about Odalie's smallest movements and wants nothing more than to go out to lunch with her. And eventually, Odalie does decide to befriend her and even invites her to live with her at her luxurious hotel suite after a few weeks of friendship. Rose, who has always been such a rule-follower, starts to go off the path she's always trod as she follows Odalie into the world of speakeasies and riches. And she starts to see the world as a lot less black-and-white and a whole lot more gray. And by the end of the book, the reader sees things as a lot more gray because you have NO idea what the heck is going on! (More about that in a sec...)

One thing I really didn't like about this book was how much foreshadowing there was in it. It seemed like every other chapter, Rose (who is telling the story in hindsight) has to throw something in like "And if only I'd known how terribly things were going to work out for me in the end..." or "But that was before everything happened," etc. You can throw something like that in your book maybe ONCE but having that in REPEATEDLY really got annoying. In the same vein, I really didn't like how Rose seemed to go back to trying to convince her readers (us) over and over again of the same facts. It seemed like there were about five different times throughout the book when Rose tried to convince us that she was NOT actually obsessed with Odalie, that she really WAS pretty naive and prudish but not all THAT naive... it seemed like the author was using too many words to say things that should have just been understood through the story itself.

However, the characters themselves were very compelling and were the main reasons why I kept reading the book (because the first 2/3 of the book I really wasn't all that interested). Well, that, and because I saw on the back of the book it talked about how Rose was an "unreliable narrator" and I thought, "There has to be an interesting twist in here somewhere--I'll keep reading and hopefully it'll make all the rest of this much more compelling!" Unfortunately, the real "twist" comes in the last three sentences and it doesn't clear much stuff up at all. I was so confused by what I read at the end of the book that I went to read reviews on goodreads for some help and everyone else was just as confused as I was. You can take the story as it is at face value, or you might take the twist to mean that Odalie is a figment of Rose's imagination and she was lying to you about a lot of things and that she's bipolar or something, or some combination of the two? But it's COMPLETELY unclear and I think it would have been a WAYYY more interesting book if it turned out that Rose and Odalie were different personalities belonging to the same person, but it's just not at all obvious by how things turn out. I'm not sold on either interpretation and I am just bugged now because the twist accomplished nothing more than making me more confused. Ugh.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Book #1 of 2014: Pivot Point by Kasie West

Welcome, 2014! I started off our new year by looking at all of the book blog posts I'd marked as "Books to Read" in my feedly and requesting about 12 of them to be put on hold at the library. (And about 8 of them have pretty long waiting lines... Dang it! But I guess that means they're probably going to be good.) I picked up the first three that came available yesterday and started reading this one first, for no other reason than I knew it was a cute YA novel that was highly reviewed by several people I trust. I definitely enjoyed it too! Addie is a teenager who lives in a "paranormal" compound, a group of people who all have special mind powers. Addie's power is that she's Divergent, or she can Search what her future will bring when she's presented with a choice, and choose which future path she wants to live out in real life. She's presented with the biggest Search she's ever had when her parents announce that they're getting a divorce, and she has to choose which parent she wants to live with. Her father is leaving the compound, so she has to choose between her "normal" paranormal life and moving out into the Normal world with all of us non-powerful people. The majority of the book is Addie's view of her two potential futures, written in alternating chapters.

I liked the structure of the book and how each chapter switched off from her potential future life in the compound and in the Normal world--it was really interesting to see how a lot of the same events happened from her different perspectives in different places. But it was also interesting to see how many things were different simply because of her presence or absence in each case. It seemed very It's a Wonderful Life and all to see what a big deal it was for Addie to be where she was. I also liked Addie as a character herself. She didn't have any big gimmick going for her, and she wasn't super confident or pretty or anything, but she seemed like a very likeable, believable and relatable character. As far as the story goes, I am pretty creeped out by the idea of living in a society where everyone has these super mental powers that they can use on everyone else. Seriously, it sounds terrible (as the ending of the book might make more explicit and obvious). Also, one minor thing, but Addie's parents totally should have taken a class on "how to break your divorce to your kids." They were terrible! They said basically, "Hey kid, we're getting divorced. Now pick who you're going to live with--you have one day." Seriously, I think that scene should have been smoothed out a bit more. But the rest of the book seemed much more believable.